NEW YORK — Ted V. Mikels, the producer and director of dozens of ultra-low-budget horror and exploitation films, notably the 1960s cult favorites “The Astro-Zombies’’ and “The Corpse Grinders,’’ died Sunday at his home in Las Vegas. He was 87.
The cause was complications of colon cancer, his son Troy said.
In the grand tradition of schlockmeisters like Edward D. Wood Jr. and Herschell Gordon Lewis, who died last month, Mr. Mikels cranked out an endless stream of bloody shockers, sci-fi thrillers, action films, and jiggle-fests like “The Doll Squad,’’ a “Charlie’s Angels’’ before the fact whose influence can be detected in the Quentin Tarantino film “Kill Bill.’’
Mr. Mikels was a flamboyant figure — known for his waxed handlebar mustache and the boar tusk he wore around his neck — who often produced, wrote, directed, and edited his films. He relied on outlandish plots, cheesy special effects, and curvaceous actresses like Tura Satana, who lent her special talents to “The Astro-Zombies’’ and “The Doll Squad.’’
The actors were, with rare exceptions, unknowns working for a pittance. The crews were eager but untested.
“I don’t think there were more than one or two people who’d ever been around a film production before,’’ Mr. Mikels told Boyd Rice for the 1986 book “Incredibly Strange Films.’’ “The script girl had never seen a script in her life, and so on.’’
All the films had one thing in common: extraordinarily low budgets. For “The Corpse Grinders,’’ about a pet food company that achieves spectacular sales after introducing human body parts into its cat food, Mr. Mikels constructed a sinister flesh-mincing machine from plywood panels and old lawn mower blades, at a total cost of $38.
“They talk about low budgets as $7,000,’’ Mr. Mikels told John McCarty, the author of “The Sleaze Merchants: Adventures in Exploitation Filmmaking’’ (1995). “If I’d had $7,000 for some of my films I could have made a spectacular.’’
He was born Theodore Vincent Mikacevich on April 29, 1929, in St. Paul, Minn. His father, George, an immigrant from what is now Croatia, was a meat-cutter. His mother, the former Katherine Mullich, was also an immigrant, from what is now Romania, where she had been a herbalist.
When Ted was in third grade, the family moved to Portland, Ore., where his father took up farming and changed the family surname.
Stage-struck from early childhood, Ted put together an act as a teenager in which he played accordion, did magic tricks, ate fire, and performed with a ventriloquist’s dummy. When he decided to make a film record of his stage appearances, he taught himself the basics of filmmaking on an 8-millimeter camera. “By the time I was 20, I was well dug in and making film projects with stories and stop-motion animation, which is an extension of magic,’’ he told McCarty.
In 1948 he married Geneva Kirsch, who died in 2011. The marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his son Troy, he leaves two brothers, Norbert and John; a sister, Eva Weiss; four daughters, Michele LaComb, Cherisse Gomez, Celine Martens, and Janine Rasmussen; another son, Theodore Jr.; 23 grandchildren; and 40 great-grandchildren.
After making educational documentaries and short dramatic films, he scraped together a minimal budget and made a black-and-white action-adventure film, “Strike Me Deadly’’ (1963).
It attracted the attention of Wayne Rogers, who later played Trapper John on the television series “M*A*S*H.’’ Rogers helped Mr. Mikels finance his next film, “Dr. Sex,’’ about a mad psychoanalyst and two colleagues who discuss their most interesting cases, and “The Astro-Zombies’’ (1968), with John Carradine in the lead role as a scientist who turns corpses into robotlike humanoids. Made on a budget of $37,000, it eventually returned $3 million.
Mr. Mikels worked every angle to boost the box-office returns.
“We had so much going for those pictures,’’ he told the website Crazed Fanboy. “We had certificates that people had to sign to get into the theater. We had a nurse taking blood pressure. We had a corpse-grinding machine in a lot of locations. We had an ambulance out in front of the theater with flashing lights. We did everything that you could do to promote a movie.’’
